


engine room

by cosmicpoet



Series: goro week 2019 [2]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst, Death, Engine Room, Final moments, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 06:34:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20774132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: The engine room scene, from Goro's perspective.





	engine room

Goro laughs bitterly, like acid, like tough lemon skin, like salt in a wound that hasn’t been reopened just once. Of course the curtain would fall whilst the play is still in action, he’s just on the wrong side of it, the ghostly hands of _failure _dripping sweat down his entire body; forced to confront that he’s not important - not to the audience, to his mother, to himself - he wants to beat down the bulkhead door and swallow Akira whole. And here he is, glaring down an imitation of himself, trying to reconcile himself not with death, but with the place in the universe that he cannot justify having occupied for so long.

Empty words fill the space around him, piercing, _biting, _cruel and cold and rattling through his hollow bones until they settle in the pit of his stomach. This will not be an easy death. Not punctuated by the desperate shouts of the Phantom Thieves - the real Phantom Thieves, not Goro in all his pathetic imitations of various roles - and _god, _it all sounds so much like pity that he wants to spit it back in their faces and beat at least one version of himself to death.

His voice breaks like porcelain, cracks, and in another universe perhaps Akira can put him back together all lined with gold, but here he’s just intimately solitary, aching to see the sky - reach up, lay his finger on the clouds, apologise. _Apologise. _Now that would take another lifetime in itself, and even then he would choke on his words, because he’s aware that he’s a bad person - worthless, dragging himself through blood in the same way that badly-buried corpses wash up after a storm, all mud-slick and swollen.

What will happen to his body when this Palace collapses?

He doesn’t want to die here in the shadow of his own failure.

His cognitive double is still reeling from the shot, and it’s a strange, sickening experience to have his pain mirrored onto something he hates so deeply; there’s just enough time to pull his gun and force a stalemate - he cannot win this, but until the bitterness of blood chokes him completely, he’ll find some nauseating familiarity in the feeling of metal against fabric, his hands clenched in the antithesis of prayer around that terrible, terrible gun.

“Hurry up,” he spits out, desperate, cornered, “and go.”

“You fool! Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Yusuke shouts, and Goro can almost picture his face. He can picture all their faces if he tries hard enough, they haunt him in the same way that paintings have eyes that follow him around the room, the same way that he sees his mother’s face in his dreams, contorting into something bloody and easy to blame. Introspection will be the death of him, if the inevitable bullet doesn’t ricochet through this empty body of his first.

And there’s anger, too. Bubbling, white-hot, ripe against his clammy skin, because he really meant it when he said that things would have been different if they’d met earlier. He’d be on the right side of the closing curtain, ready to bow and hold hands and have a last hurrah that he knows, in this life, he doesn’t deserve. How can they pretend to understand him? Pretend to care? Even down to the last moment, the only people who came close to being friends with him continue to mock him - _we have what you have not, scum, worthless, watch us watch you die._

“The real fools… are you guys.” Goro says, trying to hit somewhere that hurts, but it misfires as he chokes on his own breath, jealousy and rage and simple, overwhelming depression burning old callouses against this pathetic marionette-body. “You should have just abandoned me here a long time ago. You would have all perished… if you had tried to face these with me weighing you down.”

“Akechi-kun!” Makoto shouts. _Ah, sorry to you in particular. I hope your sister smiles when she learns of my death._

“Let’s make a deal, okay… you won’t say no… will you?”

He can hear how weak he sounds. It flits around him, vultures waiting to strike, and he wants to hurry this up so that he doesn’t have to face how pathetic he is any longer. But, if he’s dying, and if he can somehow blind himself through the masks he puts on enough to perhaps think that he’s a self-sacrificial hero, then he’ll have to force them into one last promise. Not quite the revenge he’d hoped for, but it’s enough - somehow, by god, it’s enough. There’s something inside him, screaming against his better judgement the same way that Loki screamed for him to take back control all those years ago (and how he failed; the silence bubbles into something piercing and painful), that trusts Akira. Not Joker, as talented and proficient as he is, but _Akira. _He’s begging now for the man who served him coffee and played chess with him and gently coaxed him into the hope of a better life that he always knew he’d never actualise.

“Change Shido’s heart… in my stead… end his crimes… please!”

_Ah, _now it truly sounds like begging, and he can’t dress up the ache in his voice or the tears, fat and thick, that spill down his cheeks. 

And then, Akira’s voice, just for a moment. Just enough to break through the silence and the walls and the aching disappointment; like honey, like something soft, the way laundry flits so unimportantly in the breeze - it feels like _home. _“I promise.”

He’s still not satisfied, but it feels _finished. _Enough to stand up, facing the imitation of himself - he _has _to tell himself that he’s real, he’s not a puppet, not now, not with this final act. He wonders if his mother would be proud of him, playing the hero with a toy gun; he really hasn’t changed for the better, has he?

“So,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady, unsure of who - if anyone - he’s actually addressing, “my final enemy is a puppet version of myself. Not bad.”

He shoots first. Goro Akechi always shoots first, but it doesn’t matter - he can’t protect himself from the world. But it isn’t cliché, things don’t move in slow motion; he barely has time to hear the shuddering crack of the gun before he falls fast against the bulkhead door. There’s hardly any satisfaction at all in watching his cognitive double dissipate into thick, black smoke, only a sigh of relief that he can die, now. Not quite at peace, but it’s death all the same, and he’d be a liar if he said he hasn’t been anticipating this moment from the first time he realised that the world would never truly want him.

But, god, it aches. He can only drop the gun and reach his hand to his stomach, not quite sure _why - _it’s not like he’s trying to save himself by applying pressure to the wound. Perhaps he just wants to know that it’s there. Convincing himself of reality is getting harder and harder these days - it practically _drips _in viscous poeticism that he should die outside of the real world; he never belonged there in life, why should his death be any different?

Slowly, he reaches up and lays his free hand flat against the bulkhead door. He just wants someone to hold it, feeling like a lost child being passed around homes and orphanages that never taught him how to be loved, and he aches with the pain that comes not with dying, but with dying _alone._

He imagines that Akira’s hand is only inches away from his own on the other side of the cold metal. Smiles.

And then, an afterthought, it’s all over.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed this! Please comment if you did :)


End file.
